Swan Network Labs SWAN Network Labs™

Most online services keep their own copy of you, under their own rules. Your photos, your calendar, your messages, your history: each one lives in someone else's building, and you visit it.

Swan is designed to flip that. Your life lives in a place that answers to you, and software comes to it. Running the servers doesn't, on its own, give anyone a say in who you are or who sees what.

As software gets better at acting on our behalf, who controls our identity and our information matters more than ever.

Think of a Realm as a home for your digital life. It's where your things live, where you decide who gets in, and where the house rules are yours.

In practice, a Realm is software running on computers you choose: a Realm Provider could run it for you, you could run it on a small box at home, or both. The apps on your phone and laptop will reach it through Swan's client software.

A Realm can be a studio for one, a family home, or an office for a whole organization. It can span a few places at once, like a server in your closet and a hosted machine, and still be one home with one set of rules. Your phone and laptop are how you get in.

It's designed to be end-to-end encrypted by default, and to keep your identity yours when you get a new phone, change hosts, or need to recover.

Losing your phone shouldn't mean losing your life: recovery is part of the design.

Homes are better on a street. Realms can share with each other directly, as a live view you can stop sharing at any time.

Every town has a few shared services: street signs, a clock, a public records office. Swan's is the Coordination Core. It's designed to help Realms find each other, and to provide signed time signals and public records that each Realm checks for itself, instead of taking anyone's word for it. It's designed to stay thin and inexpensive to run. It's designed so your content doesn't pass through it, and so it doesn't hold the keys that unlock your home.

• Find people, not servers. Invite Mandy by her Swan name, not her server address.
• Move your Realm without a forwarding address. Change hosts and you're still you: your identity stays the same, so sharing doesn't depend on an old server address.

Your Realm answers to you. Not to your host, and not to Swan Network Labs.

A self-hosted Realm is designed to run without our permission, our signature, or a phone call home.

Put your Realm on a street, and ordinary things get easier.

You invite Mandy, a friend you're connected with, to dinner. When she accepts, it lands on her calendar, in whichever Swan app she uses. No calendar company in the middle.

You move. Friends on Swan you've shared your address with see the new one when they look, because you shared your address, not a copy. Stop sharing, and their access ends; you just can't take back what they already saw.

Swan is being built so third-party developers can make apps that install into your Realm. We'll build some of our own too, starting with one for coordinating schedules and plans between households, and ours will play by the same rules as everyone else's. An app works with the parts of your life you allow, without needing to copy them off to its own servers.

The basics of everyday things like your calendar, tasks, and contacts will share common meanings, so a new app can understand them from day one, without you moving anything.

And the people making apps won't need to collect and guard everyone's data to build something great, so they have less reason to want yours.

Our goal for them is simple: the easy way to build should also be the honest way.

Want to build for Swan? Talk about building

An AI is most helpful when it understands your whole life: your schedule, your people, your plans. But most of us don't want to hand every private detail to an AI company.

So imagine an AI that works from what you've chosen to share with it, running in a system you control. It gets only the authority you give it, never silently yours. An outside model can be used only within the permissions you set, and there's a record every time.

Say your flight home moves. Your AI notices, suggests pushing dinner with Mandy, and asks before it sends anything. Afterwards there's a record of what it did and why.

Plenty of people have worked toward owning your digital life, and we're glad they have. We've learned a great deal from their work, and we hope to carry it forward.

Here's what Swan is designed to bring together, and what it means for you:

• One home, wherever it lives. A Realm can run at a provider, on a box at home, or both at once, and it's still one home with one set of rules. The machines underneath can change; your Realm stays the same.
• You, not your host. Your identity belongs to you, not to whoever runs the machines. Change hosts or phones without starting over.
• Apps that speak the same language. Swan apps from different developers share the basics of everyday things like events and contacts. Try another Swan app without exporting your whole life again.
• Seeing isn't unlocking. Permission to see something and the ability to open it are separate decisions, made only on evidence. A stolen password or a host's say-so alone can't unlock your things.
• Grandma friendly. Designed so everyday use doesn't mean thinking about servers, addresses, or keys. Use the phone you already have, invite people by their Swan name, and let a provider handle the rest if you like.